The Internet Protocol (IP) is a connectionless protocol. IP packets are routed from an originator through a network of routers to the destination. All physical adapter devices in such a network, including those for client and server hosts, are identified by an IP Address which is unique within the network. One valuable feature of IP is that a failure of an intermediate router node or adapter will not prevent a packet from moving from source to destination, as long as there is an alternate path through the network.
In Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), TCP sets up a connection between two endpoints, identified by the respective IP addresses and a port number on each. Unlike failures of an adapter in an intermediate node, if one of the endpoint adapters (or the link leading to it) fails, all connections through that adapter fail, and must be reestablished. If the failure is on a client workstation host, only the relatively few client connections are disrupted, and usually only one person is inconvenienced. However, an adapter failure on a server means that hundreds or thousands of connections may be disrupted. On a System/390 with large capacity, the number may run to tens of thousands.
To alleviate this situation, International Business Machines Corporation introduced the concept of a Virtual IP Address, or VIPA, on its TCP/IP for OS/390 V2R5 (and added to V2R4 as well). Examples of VIPAs and their user may be found in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,917,997, 5,923,854, 5,935,215 and 5,951,650. A VIPA is configured the same as a normal IP address for a physical adapter, except that it is not associated with any particular device. To an attached router, the TCP/IP stack on System/390 simply looks like another router. When the TCP/IP stack receives a packet destined for one of its VIPAs, the inbound IP function of the TCP/IP stack notes that the IP address of the packet is in the TCP/IP stack's Home list of IP addresses and forwards the packet up the TCP/IP stack. The “home list” of a TCP/IP stack is the list of IP addresses which are “owned” by the TCP/IP stack. Assuming the TCP/IP stack has multiple adapters or paths to it (including a Cross Coupling Facility (XCF) path from other TCP/IP stacks in a Sysplex), if a particular physical adapter fails, the attached routing network will route VIPA-targeted packets to the TCP/IP stack via an alternate route. The VIPA may, thus, be thought of as an address to the stack, and not to any particular adapter.
While the use of VIPAs may remove hardware and associated transmission media as a single point of failure for large numbers of connections, the connectivity of a server can still be lost through a failure of a single stack or an MVS image. The VIPA Configuration manual for System/390 tells the customer how to configure the VIPA(s) for a failed stack on another stack, but this is a manual process. Substantial down time of a failed MVS image or TCP/IP stack may still result until operator intervention to manually reconfigure the TCP/IP stacks in a Sysplex to route around the failed TCP/IP stack or MVS image.
While merely restarting an application with a new IP address may resolve many failures, applications use IP addresses in different ways and, therefore, such a solution may be inappropriate. The first time a client resolves a name in its local domain, the local Dynamic Name Server (DNS) will query back through the DNS hierarchy to get to the authoritative server. For a Sysplex, the authoritative server should be DNS/Workload Manager (WLM). DNS/WLM will consider relative workloads among the nodes supporting the requested application, and will return the IP address for the most appropriate available server. IP addresses for servers that are not available will not be returned. The Time to Live of the returned IP address will be zero, so that the next resolution query (on failure of the original server, for example) will go all the way back to the DNS/WLM that has the knowledge to return the IP address of an available server.
However, in practice, things do not always work as described above. For example, some clients are configured to a specific IP address, thus requiring human intervention to go to another server. However, the person using the client may not have the knowledge to reconfigure the client for a new IP address. Additionally, some clients ignore the Time to Live, and cache the IP address as long as the client is active. Human intervention may again be required to recycle the client to obtain a new IP address. Also, DNSs are often deployed as a hierarchy to reduce network traffic, and DNSs may cache the IP address beyond the stated Time to Live even when the client behaves quite correctly. Thus, even if the client requests a new IP address, the client may receive the cached address from the DNS. Finally, some users may prefer to configure DNS/WLM to send a Time to Live that is greater than zero, in an attempt to limit network-wide traffic to resolve names. Problems arising from these various scenarios may be reduced if the IP address with which the client communicates does not change. However, as described above, to affect such a movement of VIPAs between TCP/IP stacks requires operator intervention and may result in lengthy down times for the applications associated with the VIPA.
Previous approaches to increased availability focused on providing spare hardware. The High-Availability Coupled Multi-Processor (HACMP) design allows for taking over the MAC address of a failing adapter on a shared medium (LAN). This works both for a failing adapter (failover to a spare adapter on the same node) or for a failing node (failover to another node via spare adapter or adapters on the takeover node.) Spare adapters are not used for IP traffic, but they are used to exchange heartbeats among cluster nodes for failure detection. All of the work on a failing node goes to a single surviving node. In addition to spare adapters and access to the same application data, the designated failover node must also have sufficient spare processing capacity to handle the entire failing node workload with “acceptable” service characteristics (response and throughput).
Automatic restart of failing applications also provides faster recovery of a failing application or node. This may be acceptable when the application can be restarted in place, but is less useful when the application is moved to another node, unless the IP address known to the clients can be moved with the application, or dynamic DNS updates with alternate IP addresses can be propagated to a DNS local to clients sufficiently quickly.
Other attempts at error recovery have included the EDDIE system described in a paper titled “EDDIE, A Robust and Scalable Internet Server” by A. Dahlin, M. Froberg, J. Grebeno, J. Walerud, and P. Winroth, of Ericsson Telecom AB, Stockholm, Sweden, May 1998. In the EDDIE approach, a distributed application called “IP Address Migration Application” controls all IP addresses in the cluster. The cluster is connected via a shared-medium LAN. IP address aliasing is used to provide addresses to individual applications over a single adapter, and these aliases are located via the Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) and ARP caches in the TCP/IPs. The application monitors all server applications and hardware, and reallocates aliased IP addresses, in the event of failure, to surviving adapters and nodes. This approach allows applications of a failing node to be distributed among surviving nodes, but it may require the monitoring application to have complete knowledge of the application and network adapter topology in the cluster. In this sense, it is similar to existing Systems Management applications such as those provided by International Business Machines Corporation's Tivoli® network management software, but the IP Address Migration Application has direct access to adapters and ARP caches. The application also requires a dedicated IP address for inter-application communication and coordination.
U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/401,419 entitled “METHODS, SYSTEMS AND COMPUTER PROGRAM PRODUCTS FOR AUTOMATED MOVEMENT OF IP ADDRESSES WITHIN A CLUSTER” filed Sep. 22, 1999, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference as if set forth fully herein, describes dynamic virtual IP addresses (VIPA) and their use. As described in the '419 application, a dynamic VIPA may be automatically moved from protocol stack to protocol stack in a predefined manner to overcome failures of a particular protocol stack (i.e. VIPA takeover). Such a predefined movement may provide a predefined backup protocol stack for a particular VIPA. VIPA takeover was made available by International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), Armonk, N.Y., in System/390 V2R8 which had a general availability date of September, 1999.
In addition to failure scenarios, scalability and load balancing are also issues which have received considerable attention in light of the expansion of the Internet. For example, it may be desirable to have multiple servers servicing customers. The workload of such servers may be balanced by providing a single network visible IP address which is mapped to multiple servers.
Such a mapping process may be achieved by, for example, network address translation (NAT) facilities, dispatcher systems and IBM's Dynamic Name Server/Workload Management DNS/WLM systems. These various mechanisms for allowing multiple servers to share a single IP address are illustrated in FIGS. 1 through 3.
FIG. 1 illustrates a conventional network address translation system as described above. In the system of FIG. 1, a client 10 communicates over a network 12 to a network address translation system 14. The network address translation system receives the communications from the client 10 and converts the communications from the addressing scheme of the network 12 to the addressing scheme of the network 12′ and sends the messages to the servers 16. A server 16 may be selected from multiple servers 16 at connect time and may be on any host, one or more hops away. All inbound and outbound traffic flows through the NAT system 14.
FIG. 2 illustrates a conventional DNS/WLM system as described above. As mentioned above, the server 16 is selected at name resolution time when the client 10 resolves the name for the destination server from DNS/WLM system 17 which is connected to the servers 16 through the coupling facility 19 and to the network 12. As described above, the DNS/WLM system of FIG. 2 relies on the client 10 adhering to the zero time to live.
FIG. 3 illustrates a conventional dispatcher system. As seen in FIG. 3, the client 10 communicates over the network 12 with a dispatcher system 18 to establish a connection. The dispatcher routes inbound packets to the servers 16 and outbound packets are sent over network 12, but may flow over any available path to the client 10. The servers 16 are typically on a directly connected network to the dispatcher 18 and a server 16 is selected at connect time.
Such a dispatcher system is illustrated by the Interactive Network Dispatcher function of the IBM 2216 and AIX platforms. In these systems, the same IP address that the Network Dispatcher node 18 advertises to the routing network 12 is activated on server nodes 16 as a loopback addresses. The node performing the distribution function connects to the endpoint stack via a single hop connection because normal routing protocols typically cannot be used to get a connection request from the endpoint to the distributing node if the endpoint uses the same IP address as the distributing node advertises. Network Dispatcher uses an application on the server to query a workload management function (such as WLM of System/390), and collects this information at intervals, e.g. 30 seconds or so. Applications running on the Network Dispatcher node can also issue “null” queries to selected application server instances as a means of determining server instance health.
In addition to the above described systems, Cisco Systems offers a Multi-Node Load Balancing function on certain of its routers that perform the distribution function. Such operations appear similar to those of the IBM 2216.
In addition to the system described above, AceDirector from Alteon provides a virtual IP address and performs network address translation to a real address of a selected server application. AceDirector appears to observe connection request turnaround times and rejection as a mechanism for determining server load capabilities.
A still further consideration which has arisen as a result of increased use of the Internet is security. Recently, the Internet has seen an increase in use of Virtual Private Networks which utilize the Internet as a communications media but impose security protocols onto the Internet to provide secure communications between network hosts. Typically, these security protocols are intended to provide “end-to-end” security in that secure communications are provided for the entire communications path between two host processing systems. However, Internet security protocols, which are typically intended to provide “end-to-end” security between a source IP address and a destination IP address, may present difficulties for load balancing and failure recovery.
As an example, the Internet Protocol Security Architecture (IPSec), is a Virtual Private Network (VPN) technology that operates on the network layer (layer 3) in conjunction with an Internet Key Exchange (IKE) protocol component that operates at the application layer (layer 5 or higher). IPSec uses symmetric keys to secure traffic between peers. These symmetric keys are generated and distributed by the IKE function. IPSec uses security associations (SAs) to provide security services to traffic. SAs are unidirectional logical connections between two IPSec systems which may be uniquely identified by the triplet of <Security Parameter Index, IP Destination Address, Security Protocol>. To provide bidirectional communications, two SAs are defined, one in each direction.
SAs are managed by IPSec systems maintaining two databases; a Security Policy Database (SPD) and a Security Associations Database (SAD). The SPD specifies what security services are to be offered to the IP traffic. Typically, the SPD contains an ordered list of policy entries which are separate for inbound and outbound traffic. These policies may specify, for example, that some traffic must not go through IPSec processing, some traffic must be discarded and some traffic must be IPSec processed.
The SAD contains parameter information about each SA. Such parameters may include the security protocol algorithms and keys for Authentication Header (AH) or Encapsulating Security Payload (ESP) security protocols, sequence numbers, protocol mode and SA lifetime. For outbound processing, an SPD entry points to an entry in the SAD. In other words, the SPD determines which SA is to be used for a given packet. For inbound processing, the SAD is consulted to determine how the packet is processed.
As described above, IPSec provides for two types of security protocols, Authentication Header (AH) and Encapsulating Security Payload (ESP). AH provides origin authentication for an IP datagram by incorporating an AH header which includes authentication information. ESP encrypts the payload of an IP packet using shared secret keys. A single SA may be either AH or ESP but not both. However, multiple SAs may be provided with differing protocols. For example, two SAs could be established to provide both AH and ESP protocols for communications between two hosts.
IPSec also supports two modes of SAs; transport mode and tunnel mode. In transport mode, an IPSec header is inserted into the IP header of the IP datagram. In the case of ESP, a trailer and optional ESP authentication data are appended to the end of the original payload. In tunnel mode, a new IP datagram is constructed and the original IP datagram is made the payload of the new IP datagram. IPSec in transport mode is then applied to the new IP datagram. Tunnel mode is typically used when either end of a SA is a gateway.
SAs are negotiated between the two endpoints of the SA and may, typically, be established through prior negotiations or dynamically. IKE may be utilized to negotiate a SA utilizing a two phase negotiation. In phase 1, an Internet Security Association and Key Management Protocol (ISAKMP) security association is established. It is assumed that a secure channel does not exist and, therefore, one is established to protect the ISAKMP messages. This security association in owned by ISAKMP. During phase 1, the partners exchange proposals for the ISAKMP security association and agree on one. The partners then exchange information for generating a shared master secret. Both parties then generate keying material and shared secrets before exchanging additional authentication information.
In phase 2, subsequent security associations for other services are negotiated. The ISAKMP security association is used to negotiate the subsequent SAs. In phase 2, the partners exchange proposals for protocol SAs and agree on one. To generate keys, both parties use the keying material from phase 1 and may, optionally, perform additional exchanges. Multiple phase 2 exchanges may be provided under the same phase 1 protection.
Once phase 1 and phase 2 exchanges have successfully completed, the peers have reached a state where they can start to protect traffic with IPSec according to applicable policies and traffic profiles. The peers would then have agreed on a proposal to authenticate each other and to protect future IKE exchanges, exchanged enough secret and random information to create keying material for later key generation, mutually authenticated the exchange, agreed on a proposal to authenticate and protect data traffic with IPSec, exchanged further information to generate keys for IPSec protocols, confirmed the exchange and generated all necessary keys.
With IPSec in place, for host systems sending outbound packets, the SPD is consulted to determine if IPSec processing is required or if other processing or discarding of the packet is to be performed. If IPSec is required, the SAD is searched for an existing SA for which the packet matches the profile. If no SA is found, a new IKE negotiation is started that results in the desired SA being established. If an SA is found or after negotiation of an SA, IPSec is applied to the packet as defined by the SA and the packet is delivered.
For packets inbound to a host system, if IPSec is required, the SAD is searched for an existing security parameter index to match the security parameter index of the inbound packet. If no match is found the packet is discarded. If a match is found, IPSec is applied to the packet as required by the SA and the SPD is consulted to determine if IPSec or other processing is required. Finally, the payload is delivered to the local process.
In light of the above discussion, various of the workload distribution methods described above may have compatibility problems with IPSec.